1.Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to consumer protection in general, and more particularly to a method of and an arrangement for alerting a customer to the possibility that particular perishable items being bought have been subjected to conditions that may have adversely affected their quality.
2.Description of the Related Art
There are already known various ways of informing customers at various retail establishments, such as department stores, grocery stores, drug stores and the like, about diverse attributes of the products on sale there. Some of that information, such as the name of the manufacturer and/or other information revealing the source of the goods, such as a trademark or brand name, is provided on a totally voluntary basis, usually as an enticement for the customer to purchase a particular product, to develop brand loyalty, and/or otherwise enhance the image of the manufacturer, while other information, such as a health hazard warning, nutritional information, or even an expiration date, may be provided on the products or their packaging at the prompting of authorities and/or because of legal requirements for providing such information.
There is still another type of informative material that can be almost invariably found on or in conjunction with products being on sale in retail stores or similar establishments, namely indicia providing at least the store personnel if not the consumer with information about the price of the product. Such indicia are provided, if not directly on, then on objects such as price tags or labels that are securely attached to, the products or the packages containing the same.
However, with the advent of widespread use of computer databases that include the latest product price information, whether such product is being offered at any particular time for at a regular price or at a temporarily reduced price, a new trend has emerged: reliance on the product identification itself, rather than any such indicia to determine the momentarily applicable price to be paid by the purchaser at the checkout counter for each particular item. Inasmuch as there are literally thousands upon thousands of different items being offered for sale even in any medium-size grocery store, for instance, and the prices of tens or possibly hundreds of them may change if not on a daily basis then from one week to the next one, it cannot and should not be expected from the store personnel to accurately remember or recall the momentarily applicable prices of all of such items. This is why the retail industry is heavily relying, more so than on, or even to the exclusion of, any price information that may be provided on the product itself or its packaging, on the so-called Universal Product Code (UPC) designation and particularly on the so-called UPC symbol that is a graphic representation of the UPC designation.
As is well known by now, this symbol in its simplest form consists of a series of bars and intervening spaces that differ from one another in their optical properties, with the bar regions being more light-absorptive than the intervening space regions and these widths and distribution of the bars corresponding to the numerical values to be represented thereby. The main if not only reason for presenting the UPC symbol in this form is that it is easily machine-readable, that is, it can be scanned by a simple scanner that passes a light beam (usually in the red or infrared range of the spectrum) over the symbol and converts the varying-intensity of the light returning to it after being redirected back from the bar code zone into electrical signals that represent, after possible further processing in the electric domain, the numeric or alphanumeric expression of the UPC. This expression of the UPC is then presented to the computer/database circuitry that looks up the price of the item on the basis of such expression and returns such price to the cash register for further processing thereat.
As useful as all of the aforementioned information associated with the product is either to the retail store owners or to the customers or to both, there is still one area that is not addressed by it, or at least not properly or reliably: namely, the history of the product between the time it was produced or put into the channels of commerce and the time that it is being purchased. Now, during such period, the product may have been subjected to certain conditions or factors that may have adversely affected its quality or wholesomeness or may have even made the product hazardous to the customer's health or well-being. This, coupled with the possibility that the purchaser may fail to check or notice the expiration date accompanying the product in one way or another if the product is of a perishable nature, as many processed and unprocessed foodstuffs are, results in a situation that the product may be purchased, without knowledge on the part of the purchaser and in most cases even the store owner or personnel, even though its integrity or other properties may have been impaired by intervening events.